California, France, Sweden

Food in France

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Market at the Place Broglie

Market at the Place Broglie

Trying to learn how to get food in France. It’s a bit daunting finding what I want.

This is if course based on very limited experience, less than two weeks in the city of Strasbourg. Hopefully I’ll learn more as time goes by.

It turns out to be a lot more disconcerting learning a new country at age 62 than when I started learning Sweden at 20. Plus I knew a lot more Swedish in 1969 than I know French today. Besides a handful of little hole in the wall food shops, and outdoor markets open a day or two a week, there are two supermarkets close to where we live, both off the Place Kleber, Simply and Monoprix. Both are smaller than the typical Swedish supermarket, but are crammed full of food. My problem is that their offerings don’t always correspond to what I am looking for. (“Great opportunity to learn new things” one might say, but kind of hard when you have to get something to eat for dinner tonight.)

 


“I like markets, I like them a lot!”

Han Solo, “Heir to the Empire”

 

Obviously all the basics, milk, meat, cheese, fruit and veggies, are there. What I am missing are the frozen food alternatives for microwave or oven that are so common in Sweden. They may exist here, but I just don’t recognize them.

Primitive

French supermarkets (at least these two) seem a lot more primitive their their Swedish counterparts. For one thing, in Sweden when you buy fruit or vegetables they weigh them right there at the check-out. Here you have to weigh them yourself on a scale in the produce section. (if you don’t the whole check-out process grinds to a halt, or they send you away.) Really seems like a step into the past.

The check-out itself seems wrongly constructed. After the food scrolls past the cashier, there is almost no space for it while you bag up. The whole line comes to a halt while each person bags their stuff. In Sweden there is lots of room beyond the cashier to do this, and two separate sections, so the next person’s food can be moving in separate from that of the previous person.

Of course, in the US, there is usually a person bagging your food for you. I’ve always thought Swedish supermarkets more primitive than American, with less choice and less service. France seems to be a move in the opposite direction.

Across the river in Germany

Last Saturday we went to the Lidl store in Kehl in nearby Germany. Everyone says food is much cheaper in Germany than in France.

I’d looked in the door of a Lidl in Sweden, looked sort of like a huge warehouse, not as inviting as the Willys budget supermarkets where we often shop at in Sweden. The Lidl in Kehl did look like a warehouse inside, but a rather small one. And while they did stock some Germany items not available at the French stores we’ve visited, instead of the Willy approach of stocking cheapie stuff and normal offerings, they seemed to just have the cheapie stuff. (The white wine in a carton was a mixture of different wines from different EU countries and looked appalling.)

Opening Hours

On top of all this, opening hours in France (and apparently in Germany as well) seem medieval. This would be more of a surprise if the situation hadn’t been similar in Sweden only a few years ago. I remember how every year the foreign students would be completely taken aback at Easter, when all the stores, grocery and otherwise, were closed from Good Friday through Easter Monday. If you didn’t stock up, you went without. The Swedes all knew, of course, but no one thought to tell the foreign students that Swedish stores close over Easter.

But at least even then outside of major holidays, grocery stores were open on Sundays. Not so in France. Everything closes, not just ordinary shops, but also the grocery stores, many restaurants, and even the cafes. The only exception seems to be very small hole in the wall food shops. Apparently they have to pay extra to stay open on Sundays, and can’t use employees, which means only family-run businesses can get away with this.

While once it may have been the Church that wanted to keep holy the Lord’s Day, today it seems to be the unions who want to protect their members from working on Sundays. This is incredibly short-sighted of course. Sunday opening means more sales and more jobs. If you have to work on Sunday then of course you don’t have to work some other day of the week, and of course you get paid lots more.

While the Swedish unions still don’t seem to completely appreciate this, at least there has been an improvement over the years, and it would be difficult to go back. I know too little about France yet to know if anyone here is fighting for the right to buy food on Sundays.

France, Sweden

Bye Bye Radio Sweden (for now)

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Last day at Radio Sweden before my leave of absence and Strasbourg (although we don’t leave Sweden for almost three weeks). Hope to blog here about what it’s like being in France, especially compared to Sweden. All Europe certainly isn’t the same. Also launching my new site 500tshirts.org, publishing my somewhat extensive collection of t-shirts from all over the place.

General

American Sharia Law?

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Fom CSI episode “No More Bets”, about a murdered casino cheat:

Warrick: They used to tell me back in the days, the first time you got caught cheating, they’d give you a couple whacks on the hand with a ball peen hammer.

Robbins: Ow.

Warrick: The second time, you’d lose a limb.

Robbins: Third time?

Warrick: A long walk in the desert with a shovel.

This gangster justice sounds a lot like some versions of Sharia….

Sweden

Sweden’s National Day

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National day ceremonies at Millesgården, Lidingö

On Sweden’s national day, June 6, those who became Swedish citizens during the previous calendar year are honored.

 

Me with my certificate from the city of Lidingö (the dinner at the Foresta Hotel was excellent)
France, Tech

Internet (at least) 2, Sarko 0

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The media has covered the recent G8 meeting in France, but at least here in Sweden there’s been little mention of the e-G8 conference that preceded it, where Nicholas Sarkozy apparently discovered he couldn’t impose his vision of a controlled Internet.

Something like 1000 people took part in the meeting, which included luminaries like Google’s Eric Schmidt and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg, along with old media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Some, like writer and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow, refused to take part, arguing that participation would give credence to Sarkozy’s restrictive approach to the Internet. But others took advantage of the opportunity to say “non” to monsieur le Président.

Sarkozy was seemingly either somewhat unaware of exactly who he had invited, or just overly-confident that someone in his position could just force them to his way of thinking, to create a “civilized” (i.e. government-controlled) Internet.

The most high profile repudiation came from Jeff Jarvis, prominent blogger, writer (author of “What Would Google Do”), co-host of the “This Week in Google” podcast on the Twit network, and an associate professor of Journalism at the City University of New York. He took advantage of the opportunity to ask Sarkozy that in the subsequent G8 meeting he seek to “do no harm” to the Internet.

Sarkozy gave a typical politician’s answer, conciliatory, and asking whether it was harmful to impose restrictions to stop child pornography and terrorism? Apparently it never occurred to Sarko or his advisers is that this is the argument used by China to stamp out online dissidents.

Ironically, the key item on the subsequent G8 (the world’s biggest economies minus China and plus Russia) meeting was supporting the Arab Spring. Yet that revolt has been fueled by social media, the old regimes in Egypt and other countries have sought to stop it through turning off the Internet, and had Sarkozy’s proposals for a “civilized” Internet been in place, those revolts might have been nipped in the bud.

The French president also used the event to force support for more copyright protection and the music and film industries efforts to fight fair use, cloud storage, and other modern technological advances they perceive hurts their profits.



The highpoint there was a panel on intellectual property with representatives from the industry, and France’s Minister of Culture, along with last-minute invitee John Perry Barlow, poet, one-time lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The last to speak on the panel, he began by pointing that he was in fact its only member who actually created content. He then scandalized by other members of the panel by rejecting the idea that content is in fact property:

I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call “intellectual property.” I don’t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don’t have it, somebody else does.

Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.

It’s interesting that Sarkozy tried to use the G8 as his means to impose his vision of a “civilized Internet”. Just over two years ago France tried to force its “three strikes and you’re out” law on the European Union. That legislation takes away Internet access from anyone accused (without a court trial) three times of illegally downloading copyrighted material. The European Parliament rejected the whole approach.

Sarkozy seems to have thought the forum of the G8 was a better medium to get his way, but according to reports this approach found little support from other leaders. And events in the Middle East and other areas seem to have dominated the agenda.

Sweden

What happened to keeping down inflation?

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The Swedish press reported yesterday that the Stockholm County Council and Stockholm Transport plan to raise the price of the monthly subway and bus card by 100 kr to a new price of 790 kr ($125). The card is very useful, providing free travel on all forms of public transportation in Stockholm County.

Naturally almost everyone interviewed is against a rate hike. It might be motivated, of course. There are increased costs for public transportation, and last year the company showed a loss.

But what I think is interesting is that no one ever takes up the inflation argument when these rate hikes hit. My feeling from listening to the BBC is that every time a fee is raised in the UK (except maybe for the recent hike in university tuition rates that cost the Liberal Democrats dearly in the local elections), there is an immediate comparison with the rate of inflation, to see if the increase is motivated.

The Swedish Central Bank is very hawkish on raising interest rates, not just to counteract inflation, but to forestall it. Yet no one has commented on the effects of Stockholm Transport’s huge price hikes over the years. Keeping down fees is not apparently perceived as a way to hold down inflation, although employers often cite keeping down salaries in the name of fighting inflation. There was one such call from a Vice Governor of the Central Bank in yesterday’s “Dagens Nyheter“.

When I arrived in Stockholm in 1975, tbe monthly card cost 50 kr (around $40 in current buying power). The increase to kr 790 means roughly a 1600% jump in 36 years.

According to the inflation calculator at ekonomifakta.se, kr 50 in 1975 adjusted for inflation would be kr 250 today. So the price of the monthly pass is more that three times the rate of inflation.

This might very well be motivated for many reasons. What is typical of Sweden is that no one is suggesting the effects on inflation. The consumers who have to pay the higher fees end up paying higher interest rates (and very likely seeing smaller salary increases) because of the added costs contributed by the higher fees.